December 2015
Links
South Coast Alliance for Transport and the Environment (SCATE) - Chichester's Future on the Line
Chichester Deserves Better
Arundel under threat
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| My sketch of the dry River Lavant, East Lavant Sheepwash Lane |
The River Lavant has been late to reappear this year: when I visited East Lavant and the Trundle area on 12th December, the stream was still dry. This time last year it was flowing again, though it was late in winter 2009/10, 2010/11. In 2012 the bizarre sequence of dry winter followed by wet spring summer, turned it from a winterbourne into a whateverbourne, as it ran dry throughout the winter, only to reappear in May and flow on through the summer. As I said in my Autumn Notes on the Severn and Wye, autumn in much of England and Wales was largely dry until November. It seems that the subsequent rainfall during November and December has yet to filter through the chalk and raise the water table sufficiently for the stream to run.
Our seemingly increasingly erratic weather with either full-on or full-off rainfall seems to be making for generally later, or inadequate recharge, exacerbated possibly by increasing demand for water in densely populated southern England. As if having this and being banished underground through much of Chichester and lost amid the maze of already busy roads to the south of the city wasn't enough, it now faces a new potential threat: a thundering dual carriageway. The same one which threatens to disturb the peace in the neighbouring lower Arun valley to the east.
From about this time last year through to last April, I grumbled about potentially very damaging proposals to, supposedly, speed traffic along the A27 through East and West Sussex, focusing particularly in the Arundel bypass. If anything, the concurrent plans for a northern bypass around Chichester are even more worrying. This will impact on Goodwood and our regular walks out of the city centre to the South Downs around Lavant and The
Trundle.
Rather than, yet again carrying on regardless with the most environmentally damaging scheme, they would be better off improving the existing dual
carriageway to the south of the city - for the benefit of everyone, instead of having the road / motoring lobby dictating the agenda at the expense of the
environment, open spaces and general public well being.
Further to my notes last April (A27 Great
Divide - my abandoned attempt to walk to Dell Quay from Chichester City Centre),
such improvements should at the very least include a footbridge across the dual
carriageway for safe pedestrian and cycle access to Chichester Harbour from the
city centre.
Speaking as someone who knows the A27-M27 corridor through densely populated south Hampshire, with its increasingly congested, oppressive roads, do the people of Chichester and Sussex really want to aspire to this kind of thing in their area?. Even if it isn't that way when the road is first built, it's bound to get that way after a few years of traffic growth and gap-filling development. The rail network in these areas, meanwhile, is showing signs of creaking at the seams virtually on a daily basis, with regular delays.
Speaking as someone who knows the A27-M27 corridor through densely populated south Hampshire, with its increasingly congested, oppressive roads, do the people of Chichester and Sussex really want to aspire to this kind of thing in their area?. Even if it isn't that way when the road is first built, it's bound to get that way after a few years of traffic growth and gap-filling development. The rail network in these areas, meanwhile, is showing signs of creaking at the seams virtually on a daily basis, with regular delays.
I write this shortly after yet another episode of weather: the flooding in northern England and southern Scotland which followed record breaking rainfall totals in some areas (see next entry) during the first week of December. Shortly after this, the UN climate conference in Paris agreed a target to limit the average global surface temperature rise to 1.5 degrees celcius during the next century. This is a tough target - this year, we're already up to 1C above pre-industrial levels. True coal fired power stations are the big culprits when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions / carbon dioxide. Nonetheless, building more roads, runways (Heathrow III, Gatwick II) is still sending out completely the wrong message of bulldoze on regardless. Then there is the issue of air pollution from motor vehicles, especially diesel.
